The big development of the past two or three years, as far as American poetry is concerned, has been the rediscovery of a political accent—mainly young, partisan, realistic in mode, and affronted in tone. The spectrum of accomplishment runs from poets who merely watch Rachel Maddow to deeply serious poets of the caliber of Claudia Rankine who have taken to heart, whether acknowledged or not, what Ezra Pound wrote in a letter to Harriet Monroe in 1915: that "Poetry must be as well written as prose. Its language must be a fine language, departing in no way from speech save by a heightened intensity."

The fact that American audiences are paying attention to protest verse comes as a relief to some after many years when abstract appropriation was extolled as the necessary poetic process to create, not original, but unoriginal poems focused on the initial, indefinite concept instead of as a representation of lived reality. It's safe to assume that, before long, an American audience, to say nothing of American poets, will move on to the next shiny aesthetic as the era of partisan poetry gets completely stylized as fashion.

One of the poets who has not shifted from style to style much over all this time is Christian Wiman, whose Hammer Is the Prayer: Selected Poems was published last year as a nearly twenty-year retrospective. Wiman, who turned fifty last year, is an expatriate West Texan, a resident of New Haven where he teaches in the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School, a former editor of Poetry magazine, and by any measure a mature poet.

I have long admired his tough literary mind and his background in the discussions about poetry over the last quarter century. His splintery essays and cuspidate book reviews come directly out of the poet-critic tradition. Think the personal letters of John Keats and the prefaces of Walt Whitman and William Wordsworth; the manifestos of W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams; back of the book reviewers like Louise Bogan, Randall Jarrell, Howard Nemerov, and Marianne Moore, and the post-Vietnam-era little magazine arbiters, James Dickey, Donald Hall, Robert Hass, and Stanley Plumly; contemporary polemicists like Dana Gioia and William Logan; and Nobel laureates Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney—for all of whom poet's prose was meant as more than just staving off the silence between poems. Add to that poets devoted to the notebook journal as a form of essay plus accidental poetics, such as W. S. Di Piero and Fernando Pessoa.

Until quite recently, not many people outside the poetry world were fully aware of Wiman's poetry—much to the dismay of those who have followed his poems for decades, even before his first book, The Long Home, was published in 1998. One reason his poems have gained a wider readership, especially among a community of people seeking new ways to articulate their experiences with God, is the triumph of his extraordinary memoir, My Bright Abyss, published in 2013, a book about finding a viable, contemporary Christian faith that sharpened the filter through which to read his poetry.

Not quite a loner as a poet, Wiman has belonged to no group even as the New Formalists tried to claim him early on. He shed that skin pronto. But not entirely. That quality remains—if by formalism we mean strictly that he's a poet who cares about coherence and closure, as he put it in a 1998 essay called "An Idea of Order." You should get the full flavor of this statement, quoted here:

Many poets and critics now almost automatically distrust any work that exhibits formal coherence, stylistic finish, and closure. Occasionally they simply dismiss such work as naive or reactionary. At other times, and probably more damagingly, they either subtly devalue or patronize the work in question, praising the craftsmanship of the poems in such terms as make it clear that this is not "important" poetry. The hardcore version of this argument goes something like this: because our experience of the world is chaotic and fragmented, and because we've lost our faith not only in those abstractions by means of which men and women of the past ordered their lives but also in language itself, it would be naive to think that we could have such order in our art. A poet who persists in imposing order upon our uncertainty is either unconscious, ironic, or irrelevant.

In the meantime, two things changed Wiman's output. One was his growing disinterest in the idea that poetry had only one way, the realistic track, backward into memory. This made Wiman's early writing that had the texture of brickwork crumble against the pick-work of his more recent idiosyncratic sculpturing. Here's an example of the earlier writing:

Wind stirs
In the leaves, in the windmill's vacant blades,
Spinning and spinning without sound. With threads
Unwhistling through the wind split wood, over
The filled-in well where something of the cold
Stone walls, of buried air and clear water, rose
When children we called down to hear a sound
Survive us; and it stirs before it dies
These leaves that rise and fall like the leaves of the tall
Pecan tree in the shadow-flooded yard
When the day was done, the work done, right here,
Where killdeer cried into our silences
And locusts sang themselves out of their skins.

He waits, listening. It is all still now.

And now, below, something more recent. Notice, first, if you will, how remarkable it is that these passages, written many years apart about what appears to be the same Texas landscape, arrive at a similar point of reference—"He waits, listening" is the ending of the lines above while "I came to know it" concludes the one below. Please notice, too, that the ending of the newer poem below is rendered as a kind of arrival and, I suppose, the passage of years is one reason that the newer poem represents the poet as arriving from a position of reception to a position of recognition. I hope you'll see too that Wiman, from the earlier to the later work, has shifted his thinking about how to handle both reception and recognition. In the passage above, I get the feeling Wiman's thinking about mortality is simply a sensibility, as if a poet's duty is to seal bones into a bronze urn. The lines below, however, were composed after Wiman had undergone a multitude of medical treatments, culminating in a bone-marrow transplant, following the diagnosis of a rare cancer in 2005—with the knowing condition that death could come early for a very young man with a very young family:

Childhood: all the good
Godcoddled children

chiming past
the valley of the shadow ....

north, south,
east, west,

foreverness
Sifting down like dust

when—

stabdazzling darkness
icequiet:

towers of glare,
blacksleek streets,

everywhere an iron
eloquence

and a sense
of high finish

hived with space
like a face

honed
by a loneliness

it never came
to know.

I came to know it.

It should be obvious that the second thing to change was that Wiman—whose earliest poems, to trot out a different metaphor, presented themselves as cloaked in a handwoven, fully lined, four-button, Irish tweed borrowed from the poetry of early Seamus Heaney—once and for all shed the cuff jacket of bog-mucking and death-rendering to face a more imminent, truer threat. Now every new poem had to "trust no theory, no religious history or creed," as he writes in the essay "O Thou Mastering Light," "in which the author's personal faith is not actively at risk."

This is the field to which Wiman's poems now constantly return, the intimacies of mortality within a scope of Christian faith and skepticism. "I have been close to death myself lately," he says in the essay "Tender Interior," with regard to dying:

I have many nights lain awake in hospital beds and wondered what last gesture or insight I might manage or be granted, have felt despair rising like a palpable and impenetrable liquid in my room. That I have not yet known that knife-edge of time ... I have been close enough, and deranged by pain enough, to conclude that one is not always responsible for one's last acts, nor are they always worth interpretation.

This kind of topic is a long way from both the normal concerns of formalism quoted above, which impose themselves in a proprietary manner on culture, and also the extreme preoccupations of socially committed verse that sets fire to conscience.

Wiman's poems assume that the routines and relationships of day-to-day life—foremost his family, but also eating breakfast, riding the subway, meeting his doctor, watching the neighbor's chickens, saying prayers, recalling the past, demanding fear and joy in Christ—are profoundly interesting as a subject for poems. Not because they are given magnificence as the daily observances of a poet's life—that kind of egotistical foolishness is wholly alien to a poet of intimacy like Wiman who has a sense of tradition—but, instead, because they show that life sidelong, in its ordinary peculiarities, just like all our lives, yours and mine, and then transcend its familiar naturalness.

In other words, if Wiman is a formalist, he's the kind who ditches the grandiose. His work is by turns combative and poignant, feverish and hushed, jumpy and taut.

I have forgotten the little killing ditty
whispered to the red birds and the blue birds and the brown birds
not one of which I ever thought to give a name.

In the tall mesquite mistaking our yard
for a spacious place, I plugged away with my pellet gun
and got them often even in the eye, for I was trained

to my craft by primordial boredom
and I suppose some generic, genetic rage
I seem to have learned to quell or kill.

They dropped like the stones I'd throw in Catclaw Creek
or fluttered spastically and panickedly up
whereupon I took more tenacious aim—

much more difficult now because they moved—
not me, frozen as if in a camera's flash—
troubling the tyranny of the ordinary

as if a wave of meaning or unmeaning
went rippling like heat through the yard.
Fire and fire and they fell and they fall, hard.

I felt nothing, and I will not betray those days
if days are capable of being betrayed,
by pretending a pang in my larval heart

or even some starveling joy when Tuffy yelped.
I took aim at the things I could not name.
And the ditty helped.

And yet, even those lines reveal something underneath about spiritual apprehension—the vigor of faith in Christ alongside a decay of belief—and an ongoing concern with the exterior, concrete world to expose an inevitable, if not inescapable, sense of solitude. The poem proposes that solitude as a companion is nice and all but you're going to want to tell someone about it; that even conviction in lyric poetry—"And the ditty helped"—means not ignoring life but finding it agreeable; that through the face-to-face conversation with yourself about despair and love and shame you come to understand how you belong to time and existence; and that to withdraw to your inmost self is to discover that your relationship to nature and community and God is indivisible.

The poem quoted above, called "Little Killing Ditty," is a disparaging statement—though surely a poetics, too—about false comforts as much as it is about how to take "aim at the things I could not name." "Modern spiritual consciousness is predicated on the fact that God is gone," Wiman writes elsewhere in "Varieties of Quiet,"

and spiritual experience, for many of us, amounts mostly to an essential, deeply felt and necessary, but ultimately inchoate and transitory feeling of oneness or unity with existence. It is mystical and valuable, but distant. Christ, though, is a shard of glass in your gut. Christ is God crying I am here, and here not only in what exalts and completes and uplifts you, but here in what appalls, offends, and degrades you, here in what activates and exacerbates all that you would call not-God. To walk through the fog of God toward the clarity of Christ is difficult because of how unlovely, how "ungodly" that clarity often turns out to be.

All that, you might say, is a form of stringency in need of formality. And you may be glad for the way Wiman molds it all into place in a poem like "From a Window" that begins in a grieving, spiritual free fall and travels through a sequence of threshold-crossings to arrive at a contingent vision of the transcendent:

Incurable and unbelieving
in any truth but the truth of grieving,

I saw a tree inside a tree
rise kaleidoscopically

as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.
I pressed my face as close

to the pane as I could get
to watch that fitful, fluent spirit

that seemed a single being undefined
or countless beings of one mind

haul its strange cohesion
beyond the limits of my vision

over the house heavenwards.
Of course I knew those leaves were birds.

Of course that old tree stood
exactly as it had and would

(but why should it seem fuller now?)
and though a man's mind might endow

even a tree with some excess
of life to which a man seems witness,

that life is not the life of men.
And that is where the joy came in.

This is the kind of poetry, based on alertness to primitive forms in the natural world, that has no need for allegory or moralizing. It has one job, and it wants to get that one thing right. The subjects of the poet are all around him. Private life, and the small rooms and the corners of those rooms in which that life is lived, and from which one sees life around you, can be enough.

Focusing on such natural objects—what is sought after, envisioned, necessitated, needed, yearned for—makes Wiman a Dickinsonian poet in the sense that he is interested in "freakish early spring," "a shadow in the shape of a house," "All afternoon in the afterlife / of little things," "the apple sapling ... blown / almost out of the ground," "untouchable / angles," a "little burn / or birthmark," "the creaked creases / in the rough skin of the palm / of one so long asleep," "a clutch of mayflies," "a black candle burning," "a fat black snake," "all the day's aches / eclipsed / / and a late sun / belling," "a bit of the Gospel grueling out of you," "Christ's ever unhearable / and thus always too bearable / scream"—all of which, added together, I suppose, Wiman calls, ultimately, the name of "God ... belonging to every riven thing he's made." Totemic specimens cluster in slender, invigorated lines and stanzas, often made up, in the most recent poems, of something you might thread through an onomatopoeic echo machine:

it matters
I tell you

it matters
the matter

one mind
collects,

one memory
protects

Wiman likes repetition with small variations: "Goof the noon / gone too soon / like the house / and shed." Some of his best poems are composed of reverberations and parroting, the echoes lopped off at contorted angles, fudged, twisted, warped. In a word, slant:

Given a god more playful
more sayful
less prone
to unreachable peaks
and silence at the heart
of stone

I might have plundered
thunder
from a tick's back

I might have swigged
existence
from a tulip's bell

and given all hell
to a god who given time

knew goddamn well
what to do with it:

make, and proliferate,
and vanish
when you are through with it

Read together, the poems give an impression of a lively precognition or preconsciousness, an aura of carving benevolence from the sinister and vice versa—

Lord is not a word.
Song is not a salve.
Suffer the child, who lived
on sunlight and solitude.

This kind of language jostles with peculiar new purpose like a small discovered plateau where the pump jacks are "bowing to the ground, / Again, again, again" in the psyche.

At the same time, Wiman's imagination has an acerbic side. The psychic condition of imminent death must be—for as long as possible—thwarted.

Memory's mercies
mostly aren't

but there were
I swear
days
veined in grace

like a lucky
rock
ripping
electrically over

whatever water
there was—

ten skips
twenty
in the telling:

all the day's aches
eclipsed

and a late sun
belling

even sleepy Leroy
back
into his body
to smile
at some spirit-lit

tank-rock
skimming the real

so be longingly
no longing

clung to it
when it plunged

bright as a firefly
into nowhere

I swear.

The imaginary his poems discharge over the decades has much to do with knowing the presence of time, landscape, family, and conscientious faith in order to comprehend their absence. Perhaps that's why, over some twenty years, the scale of his poems is rarely expansive. You don't need bluster. You may not even need, as he writes in My Bright Abyss, to sound the "clear, true notes of what I believe, but the varieties of quiet in between." Everything else, any manner of heroism or immodesty, would seem forced, not least because the merits of intimate feelings and accuracy about close, familiar relationships demand affinity, interiority, a frame within the frame, as if seeing the world from inside a house, through a window.

It's for this reason, I suppose, that objects in Wiman's poems tend to appear over and over again like visions in different forms, contingent on his seeking the simplest pendulous moments:

a vaporous pond
as if water wanted out of itself;
tip of the sycamore's weird bare reach:
some latency in things leading not so much to speech
as to a halting, haunted art
wherein to master was to miss— how to say this, how to say this ...

The aura around objects and people and, especially, landscapes is an intimacy that verges on catching a glimpse of the "last extravagant streaks of light," whose details are hostile to being muffled by philosophical generalizations. A sense of place—and not just spiritual ambience but a Christian worldview—comes through quite clearly once you have spent time in the windy drifts of the poems.

Wiman grew up in West Texas where, under wide blue skies that shudder some evenings in pink smudgy layers across the flats, the hard and wild semis roll fast through the towns and rickety pickup-trucks are shrines to ruggedness. That's the cliché. And yet, in Wiman's poems, it has been an impressionistic landscape seen, perhaps withstood, through a strict, fundamentalist state of mind—"To call the place predominantly Christian is like calling the Sahara predominantly sand," he writes in My Bright Abyss—and West Texas exists as a renegade sort of self-made culture where the roughhewn and the empirical mingle in rather predictable ways. A literary mind led Wiman to think optically and in a certain scale. A poem came to be formed by what was discernible, perceptible, seeable, beheld. I'm unaware of a more auto-didactic poet. At least it would be hard to think of one whose learnedness in that wider, opener side of Texas (as opposed, I mean, to the East Texas of my upbringing) was more exactly placed at the service of interpretation. His poems feel grounded, even as they are full of absences, abstract echoes, shadows of encounters, small, exquisite hours. The landscape they evoke gives you the unshakable feeling that you seem always to be looking into a legible horizon full of "the dirt and the distance and the seared air," "some bright nowhere / of broad fields and sunlight," "the broken promise that is earth."

"More and more what I want from the poetry I read is some density of experience," Wiman wrote in "Fugitive Pieces" in 2006, "some sense that a whole life is being brought to bear both on and in language. It's not a quality one can counterfeit, nor do I think that age, breadth of experience, or a certain equanimity of tone—'wisdom,' call it—are necessarily the issue." Because Wiman's type of lyric liveliness distinguishes thoughts and actions, it renders scenes as totally familiar. And even though there is a strong privacy in Wiman's poems—and this, I should add, sets them apart from the previous trend in American poetry of iffy, ahistorical, theoretical nihilism as well as the current trend of Social engagement—they refer to communities one can only experience through his solitude, to conversations and observations that took place as if long ago.

But anecdote is not his medium. The most spectacular poem in Wiman's more recent work, "My Stop Is Grand," presents itself as a silky burrowing: lights and darks, fire and a "cold gleam." The plot of the poem is a subway ride in Chicago. But the blooming figure—of traveling through the dark of a seedy alley into the radiance of day—resolves in a troubled closure:

I have no illusion
some fusion
of force and form
will save me,
bewilderment
of bonelight
ungrave me

as when the El
shooting through a hell
of ratty alleys
where nothing thrives
but soot
and the ratlike lives
that have learned to eat it

screechingly peacocked
a grace of sparks
so far out and above
the fast curve that jostled
and fastened us
into a single shock of—
I will not call it love

but at least some brief
and no doubt illusionary belief
that in one surge of brain
we were all seeing
one thing:
a lone unearned loveliness
struck from an iron pain.

Already it was gone.
Already it was bone,
the gray sky
and the encroaching skyline
pecked so clean
by raptor night
I shuddered at the cold gleam

we hurtled toward
like some insentient herd
plunging underground at Clark
and Division.
And yet all that day
I had a kind of vision
that's never gone completely away

of immense clear-paned towers
and endlessly expendable hours
through which I walked
teeming human streets,
filled with a shine
that was most intimately me
and not mine.

First "bewilderment," followed by "shooting through a hell," followed by "the fast curve that jostled / and fastened us," followed by "illusionary belief," followed by, followed by, followed by. Blinded by the glare, he cannot find the vanishing point that exists against the speckles of existence. But he does find a blessed feeling "filled with a shine." Likewise, the poem, as so many of Wiman's poems are, is full of tenderness. The warmth and lovingkindness aren't used as some deployment of literary means, but come across as a complexion, a temperament.

Unlike Heaney, whose poetry he reveres, Wiman is not a jittery seer. There's woe and bliss, partner, bliss and woe. But as makes sense for a poet who makes no objections about both the necessity of tradition and disrupting it, Wiman beguiles with precision. The edges of perception are smooth, tapered—at once transparent and dense and twinkling like an oil painting—as a way of advancing his own version of human consciousness. In fact, his concentration rarely fails, and his talent as a poet of spiritual argument is unsurpassed among living American poets.

"What do you do, what do you say, what in the world are you going to believe in," Wiman asks, "when you are dying?" Some may find such questions not merely obsolete but quite old-fashioned. But Wiman uses his poems to transcend the conventional strategies of the lyric. He does so, as I read him, to forage with difficulty between the seams of his own psyche. What memories can poetry find to depict being a man from within? What can poems say about inwardness, abundance, burden, belief, anger, or resentment? How can poems generate different meanings when poems draw their materials from the familiar? It is such questions that Wiman's poems turn with intensity and magnitude.

* * *

About the Author
David Biespiel's tenth book, The Education of a Young Poet, was published in 2017. His other recent books are A Long High Whistle, Charming Gardeners, and The Book of Men and Women.